In Marjorie's Wake
Forging a Sense of Place
In Marjorie's Wake, a film from Equinox Documentaries, Inc. has been completed in High Definition and is being broadcast in Florida and across the U.S. The film was presented to a national PBS audience by the Miami PBS affiliate WPBTV.
In Marjorie's Wake examines the many ways in which the St. Johns River of Florida has shaped culture — literature, art and music — over time. It does so by re-creating a historic trip that Pulitzer-prize winning author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings once made on the river in 1933. Rawlings, encouraged and joined by her Cracker neighbor Dessie Smith, launched a small boat just south of the aptly-named "Puzzle Lake" southeast of Orlando. The pair spent the next ten days navigating downstream on the river, camping on the shores or on mud flats, and catching fish or shooting game for food.
Rawlings, a careful, precise writer, was a Northern intellectual who was learning to trust her instincts in the backwoods of Florida. The river trip, chronicled as the "Hyacinth Drift" chapter in her book Cross Creek, symbolized her willingness to more closely pay attention to the clues found in nature.
Our film revisits the historic Rawlings and Smith voyage. But it also reveals the challenges and contrasts found in the modern trip that our own two river sojourners make on the St. Johns. One is Winter Park resident Leslie Kemp Poole, a writer, a teacher in the Environmental Studies Program at Rollins College and a Ph.D. candidate in environmental history at the University of Florida. The other is Jennifer Chase, a musician, song writer, playwright and educator who teaches at Florida Community College in Jacksonville.
In planning for this trip, Poole talked at length with Dessie Smith before Smith passed away at the age of 96. During the conversations, Dessie reflected on her own time on the St. Johns and offered some inimitable advice on how to make a modern voyage on the St. Johns and the Ocklawaha Rivers.
Our own trip shadowed the route taken by Rawlings and Smith, from south of Puzzle Lake north on the St. Johns to the Ocklawaha River, and finally back to the original Rawlings home, now preserved as a State Historic Park at Cross Creek. Along the way, the women camped in the wilderness of conservation land in the watershed, and stayed at overnight riverfront lodging at fish camps and marinas. Both not only explored the river, but more closely examined their own connections to it through their respective art and craft.
Although much has changed since the original Rawlings trip in the 1930's, much of the natural world has remained. Others who felt the tug of Florida and the St. Johns on their hearts were closely considered---from naturalist William Bartram to artist Winslow Homer. During the trip, the pair met modern residents of the watershed whose own literature and art have been inspired by the river, including landscape painter Jim Draper and author and Timucua historian Fred Hitt.
Chase herself wrote and produced a CD of songs from the actual river trip, and Draper illustrated the cover art for it. J.T. "Jake" Glisson, who as a young boy was a neighbor of Rawlings, shares his recollections of growing up at the Creek with the women. (Glisson, an artist, was also commissioned to create a watercolor illustrating the film.)
Click here to listen to a sample from "Welaka" (.aif, plays with Quicktime in new window)
The CD is available as our gift to you for a suggested donation of $12.00 (+$4.95 shipping and handling) in our donor shopping area.
It is the goal of Equinox Documentaries to help modern Floridians more fully understand the inextricable connection between people and place. Coming to grips with how others have been shaped by geography can help us appreciate the vital energies still available to us here. These energies — hidden in the grace of our rivers, the magic of our springs, and the mystery of our unique wet-dry terrain — can inform our sensibilities. In the best of worlds, they may even lead us to some wisdom about the sustainability of land and water, of people and culture.